Families of Whitey Bulger victims will continue seeking justice

Family members of the man who died in a shooting in 1982 after a former Boston FBI agent passed information to a fugitive gangster, are challenging an appeal panel’s decision to dismiss their wrongful death lawsuit.

Brian Halloran was killed alongside Michael Donahue after the former FBI agent John Connolly told James “Whitey” Bulger that Halloran planned to implicate him in a murder.

Last week the appeal panel ruled that families of both the victims and the $8.5 million in damages that the FBI had been ordered to pay were unfounded as they were filed weeks after the September 2000 statute of limitations expired.

Halloran’s family plans to appeal the decision before the February 24 deadline.

"The dissenting judge believed that because another individual, James ‘Jimmy’ Flynn, had been indicted and tried for the murder in the early 1980s, the family had reasonable basis to believe that Jimmy Flynn was actually the murderer," attorney William E. Christie, who represents Halloran’s estate, told the “Boston Herald.”

Bulger carried out the murder of Halloran alongside another member of his notorious Winter Hill Gang, shooting him 22 times. Donahue was a bystander who was shot in the head as he attempted to dodge bullets.

"The murders robbed both the Donahue and Halloran families of loved ones, and their losses were exacerbated by years of government evasion," two of the three judges said last Thursday.

"But statutes of limitation are designed to operate mechanically. They aspire to bring a sense of finality to events that occurred in the distant past and to afford defendants the comfort of knowing that stale claims cannot be pursued," they added.